Crime dramas cut straight to case

By CHAD TAYLOR

If you flick through the review pages you may notice the category of crime has become extremely broad nowadays. The Coen brothers' movies are considered arthouse and intellectual yet nearly all have centred around a murder, theft or kidnapping; branded crime authors like Lawrence Block and Ian Rankin produce serial novels that are praised for following their characters' lives rather than their misdemeanours.

At first glance, Law & Order: Criminal Intent (TV3 9.30pm) and CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (TV3 8.30pm) would both appear to be crime shows that play it straight down the middle. Their urban characters sport a blank disinterest that would be out of place in soapy dramas like E.R. and their hectic plots, jumping as they do between the autopsy table and the whiteboard, concerning themselves with tasks that are variously grim and obscure.

On tonight's episode of Criminal Intent Detectives Robert Goren (Vincent D'Onofrio) and Alexandra Eames (Kathryn Erbe) protect an abused child as well as search for the object that left an impression on a victim's cashmere sweater. Neither job seems like fun, but the direction and editing make it so, skipping between the turning moments like a stone across water.

CSI worships science and the rational; Criminal Intent is violent, godless and slightly to the right of Rudolph Giuliani, the former mayor of its locale. Far from finding this depressing, audiences flock to the both series. Criminal Intent's close relative, Special Victims Unit, has made a dent in the national ratings for TV3 with its fine cast and weekly stories of brutality towards women and children.

Law & Order uses its police badge as your shield, taking you places you normally wouldn't go, let alone tolerate.

Criminal Intent, the newest in the Law & Order franchise, lacks the byzantine complexity of its partners' scripts. Although it follows the sleuths of the Major Crimes Squad, the cases rate on about the same level of seriousness as others committed on television. The divisional offices are large and clean - a signifier of the squad's power relative to other organisations in the crowded city, and the interrogation rooms are uncomfortably small, a precursor to the psychological tension within.

Kathryn Erbe is diminished by her overbearing partner D'Onofrio both as an actor and a character, but neither she nor her on-screen self seem bothered by it. It's the third man, Assistant DA Cutter (Courtney B. Vance), who lights up scenes, smirking and sparkling with a professional bemusement just short of Dr Hibbert.

Cutter's smugness is part of what makes Criminal Intent cultish and weird beyond the mainstream. It's dispassionate treatment of sex and violence approaches the fetishistic and its investigator duo, tersely joshing their way through bodies and grime, remind us more of the folks we've meet on X-Files and The Avengers. But if calling it crime is what it takes to suck you into a noirish, big city mindspace, knock yourself out.